As the sun bears down on the gardens of a mountainside town, an old man perches on a ladder, picking oranges from his tree. Across the wall he sees his neighbour’s wife sunbathing on the terrace while their young maid takes cares of the daily chores. But the idyllic picture with which Evelio Rosero’s The Armies opens, is quickly evaporated.
The next signal of unease is revealed almost casually. Some local inhabitants have ‘disappeared’ it seems; no-one knows where, and there are oblique references to guerrillas and paramilitaries. When Ismael takes a walk early one morning, the menacing atmosphere notches up a gear. A white shadow that runs across the street turns into a group of soliders who march through the town square and demand identification papers. The sound of gunfire signals the approach of war.
When Ismael is eventually able to return home, it’s to find Otilia has disappeared. Caught in the cross fire between guerrilla groups, paramilitaries and government forces, the inhabitants all make plans to leave but Ismael cannot go until he finds his wife. He becomes an unwilling witness to a senseless civil war. His reveries about the past give way to the immediate need to survive until his wife returns.
Evilio Rosero won the 2009 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in the UK with The Armies. I chose it to represent Colombia in my Reading Along the Equator challenge after noticing that it was ranked third in a Guardian Top 10 list for Colombian writing. If I say the the first spot was One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, you’ll get the idea of the regard for Rosero’s book. It’s slim in size with a somewhat economic narrative style which is sometimes eliptical and needs unravelling. But there is no mistaking the depth of sadness that I felt when I reached the conclusion.
A book I thoroughly recommend.